culture shock, part one of...

I've only been back in the States for a week and a half (has it really been just that long?), but as early as Day 2 of being back, I started to wonder when (or whether) reverse culture shock would hit me. Really, I had wondered why it hadn't already when Bryan and I arrived in South Africa, which is just about as Western as any city in the US. But "finally," about a week ago when I was at Hokie Grill at Virginia Tech with Bryan and Chris, I all of a sudden felt like I'd been hit by a Mack truck...

Nothing's the same.
No one's clothes have holes in them.
Everyone smells like they've had a shower within the last 48 hours.
The floors and windows and tables and people and plates and clothes and faces and books and feet and finger nails and...everything's all so remarkably clean.

Beyond internalizing how extremely clean my toes were, what really hit me was that things just are. There are many worlds on this earth; we call places like Zambia the "third" and places like the US the "first." They've always been there, the poor will always be with us, and neither the poignancy of my conviction nor the number of tears I cry are ever going to change the fact that the dichotomy in this world doesn't make a bit of sense. No super-hero tendencies of mine to "change the world" or "make a difference" are going to be revolutionary; and although there is certainly power in words spoken with grace and in love, what I say about what I see is less important than what I choose to do about it.

After about a week of digesting that little bit, I think God prepared me to go to Africa and to deal with the brokenness, the dirtiness, the painful slowness, everything that many people think are the "hard" parts of living and experiencing the culture in a third world country. Really, culture shock when I arrived in Africa didn't happen drastically or suddenly. Every so often I'd get a jolt of, "whoa, this is reality" - but when I saw orphans, it was okay, because I was there with them. I saw depravity, but that was okay too, because I knew it was there under the surface all along. I saw malnourished kids and negligent parents and dying dogs, but it was okay, because I could see it in front of my face, I wasn't hidden from it, I wasn't hiding from it: it was real. It was in front of me in its entirety - no walls, no masks, no curtains to hide behind. It was okay because, even if I couldn't do anything about it, I was in some very small way, simply by physically being there, a part of it. I didn't have an "off" button or a remote to switch the channel. The same eighty kids with the same stained and torn clothes that they had on today would be at the school, simply waiting for me to play with and hug them, tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. They live a five minutes' walk from where I was sleeping. So even though we lived in the lap of luxury on base - we basked in running water, electricity, microwaves, fridges, washing machines, and plenty of food - I couldn't possibly escape reality. It was literally right outside our front door.

So now? Well, now I'm not there. There's not a strong enough word to describe how devastatingly different two places can be. Back on an American college campus (Virginia Tech a week ago, now at UNC and Duke), it seems like the TV is stuck permanently on "off" mode, and I've lost the ability to switch it back on again.

I'm wondering, though, if I'm bystepping some of the initial "normal" stages of culture shock (hostility, initial period of coping, and finally acceptance and reintegration - from what I'm told). I guess I got the "hostility" stage out of my system last summer, when I was in Houston hanging out with homeless men and women at Church Under the Bridge. I was upset at myself and my family for living in such relative excess and unnecessary luxury when there were people who didn't even have blankets who were sleeping under bridges five minutes down the road. I seemed to skip that stage of culture shock this time, though. I certainly know that people aren't bad simply because they have money to buy food, they're able to wear clean, un-tattered clothing, and they have laptops and iPods and cell phones (I have all of these as well!). I know, too, that God wants us to give generously and, at the same time, to enjoy the gifts he's given us - time, resources, and people all included. It's also, obviously, not like everyone who hasn't gone on a mission trip is oblivious to what's going on in the rest of the world. That's not it at all. I'm simply emotionally and spiritually coming to understand that there is a reality in Mongu that is so dissimilar to the kind of reality that I'm used to here in the States, so drastically different and so remote from the one I grew up in, that I have to wonder how the world can support such different ways of life without imploding from the strain of accommodating them both.

Before this summer, I knew, mentally and in theory, the extreme discrepancy between poor and rich in this world. Now I know it by experience. Now I truly realize the reality of the fact that the homeless in America live like kings and queens compared with the rest of the world - that the statistics are, in fact, painfully true - and that, no matter how much I'd prefer it to be otherwise, they are not an exaggeration.

Although I'd love to say that it doesn't make a difference in your life whether you go experience a third world country in its entirety for yourself or not, I think it does. So now the question remains: what am I going to do about it?